Study: DRG Inappropriate for Psychiatry

OPEN MINDS The Behavioral Health & Social Service Industry Analyst Industry News DRGs are inappropriate for psychiatric reimbursement due to the greater number of patient outliers in psychiatric cases, according to an article, ‘Psychiatric DRGs: More Risk For Hospitals?’, by Chaim Ehrman, Gerald Funk, and James Cavanaugh, M.D., that was published in the September, 1989 issue of Journal of Health Care Marketing. While the authors believe that DRG reimbursement will soon be applied to psychiatry, they present evidence that psychiatric conditions are more likely to exceed DRG cut-off values for length of inpatient stay (two standard deviations above . . .